Cheating robots, psychopathic plagiarists, and birds that fake out their …

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Robots have now been programmed to deceive: "We have developed algorithms that allow a robot to determine whether it should deceive a human or other intelligent machine and we have designed techniques that help the robot select the best deceptive strategy to reduce its chance of being discovered," said one Robert Arkin in describing his role in helping the robots take over the world. We generally ascribe the ability to choose our actions based on who we're dealing with to having a theory of mind, but apparently it can be recapitulated with an appropriate algorithm and a bit of game theory. The algorithm was subjected to rigorous testing: the robot using it had to engage in a game of hide-and-seek with another robot.

Cheaters are psychopaths: Seriously. There were several experiments that were used to demonstrate this, but the one that stood out is where the researchers actually informed a set of 114 students that their essays would be scanned using plagiarism detection software. Sixteen of them cheated anyway. Although poor verbal skills were linked to cheating, the association with psychopathic tendencies was even stronger. At least some of the cheaters also reported that they saw it as a route to getting the grade they felt they deserved in the class.

Male bower birds deceive potential mates by playing with visual perspective: The last deception article for today's edition is a pretty good one. Male bower birds form elaborate structures, and clear an area of the forest floor for their potential mates to approach, arranging objects carefully along the path. These objects are apparently placed to mess with the female's perspective, with the larger objects located further from where the female will first approach. To confirm this is intentional, the researchers messed up the bird's careful ordering; within three days, the birds were already at work, restoring the original size gradient.

Urban birds find fitness overrated: The brilliant plumage of male cardinals not only looks nice, but it's an honest indication of fitness—brighter colors tend to correlate with body mass and other measures of health. But only in rural birds. The more urbanized the surroundings, the more the correlation between bright plumage and body condition broke down. The plumage coloration comes from carotenoid-rich foods, and the authors suggest that, in cities, the birds may just not have to work very hard to come across them.

Older Germans want all those narcissistic kids off their lawns: This study takes an interesting route to figure out how different age groups view each other: track the amount of time they spend reading articles about each other at online news sites. The young (where young is 18-30) tend to spend more time reading about themselves, and prefer articles with a positive message. The old (50-65, in this case), well, would seem to enjoy seeing the young taken down a notch. They selected articles that focused on younger people, but had an overall negative message. Why the focus on bad news? It makes them feel better: "exposure to negative news about younger individuals bolstered older recipients' self-esteem."

While cities drive the Swedes nuts: Apparently, the incidence of schizophrenia and similar disorders is higher in cities than rural areas, and a longitudinal study of over 200,000 Swedish citizens finds that most of the effect can be correlated with social fragmentation at the level of schools.

A case of misplaced identity: It's not news that people accept things as facts that aren't, especially when it comes to newsworthy figures like presidential candidates. A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General looks into why, and it turns out that, once people recognize someone as being different, they're more likely to believe the lies. So, for example, filling out a card that included a field for age caused the percentage of people who thought McCain might be senile to shoot from 43 percent to 73 percent. But the prompt didn't even have to have anything to do with the matter in question; a card that had a blank for race caused the percentage of undecided voters who thought Obama might be a socialist to rise from 25 percent to 62 percent.